May 11 The Idiot Brigade

I've never been a fan of Screamin' Stephen A. Smith on ESPN and, sadly, he has a regular midday radio show in New York on 1050 AM, the local ESPN radio affiliate. He says stupid things all the time that are just way too easy to skewer so I just don't. Basically, time and the ability to pick what thing to mock keep me from posting regular features on how big an idiot Stephen A. Smith is today. But the other day he had Donald Trump on his show, another schmuck of all schmucks who seems lately to really enjoy bashing other millionaires.

A few weeks ago, Trump went after equally-loathesome fatass Rosie O'Donnell, perhaps curious as to who the public would side with when both combatants are complete a-holes. On 1050 radio the other day, Trump chose to bash Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks over and over and over again. He referred to them as "losers" and basically said they'd never win with Cuban as owner because he, too, was a loser and didn't "look like" a winner. Excellent analysis, Donald. I'm sure I'm not alone is saying that I wouldn't mind have Mark Cuban own my favorite NBA team. They didn't lose because Cuban's a bad owner or puts to much pressure on them. But that's neither here nor there.

At one point, while Trump is railing against Cuban, he remarks that Cuban "copied The Apprentice" (Trump's overrated show that's not nearly as original as Donald thinks it is/was) with his own show. Stephen A does his exaggerated chuckle at this and says, "Ha ha ha, yeah, da Bachelor..." before allowing Trump to continue pointificating.

Except Cuban's show was The Benefactor and not The Bachelor. Words are hard for Screamin' Stephen. I know this is a little thing but it's one of those small things that, when you hear it, provide an indication of just how stupid a person is.

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Then the cavalcade of brainlessness continued yesterday on a show I normally enjoy very much. The drive-time show on 1050 is hosted by Michael Kay, the voice of the Yankees on the YES network. Now, a lot of people don't like Michael and I can see why you might not. But if you listen to his show on a regular basis, you'd grow to love it because it's actually very funny and it's not your typical clueless meatheads yelling at the callers like they're drunks in a sports bar.

However, yesterday, Michael was doing the day game the Yankees had so his backup, Don LaGreca was filling in for him. Don is a good guy, too, and does a good job as a sidekick and occasional host. However, he was paired with legendary idiot Steve Phillips and this is the death knell to anyone who has an aspiration to be successful on TV or radio. Whenever Phillips is on Baseball Tonight, it usually comes to a point where he says so many stupid things that John Kruk wants to strangle him.

On yesterday's show, Phillips was repeatedly credited with "coming up with" a way to measure Roger Clemens' value to the Yankees. I'm not making this up. I mean, I'd say you measure his value by how his mere prescence intimidates other lineups or how it makes your pitching staff that much deeper or, hey, you know, straight wins and losses and other quantifiable stats.

But no. No, Steve Phillips measure of figuring out Roger Clemens' worth to the Yankees is to take the Yankees five starters and the Red Sox five starters and to rank them in order from 1 to 10. Wherever you think Clemens fits in there is....your answer...? Really? I don't get it. And no matter how long I listened, I still didn't get it. And do you know why? Because it's idiotic. What do the Red Sox starters have to do with Roger Clemens being a Yankee? So what if I'd put Schilling or Beckett ahead of him? They aren't on the same team. And the group did nothing to explain how this helps us understand Clemens' value. Most of them had Clemens ranked 5th or 6th out of those 10. Okay. Now what? What does that tell us?

At one point, they actually got Michael Kay on the phone before he got on a plane with the Yankees to head to Seattle. LaGreca asked him about Clemens' value to the Yankees and then credited Phillips with this wonderful formula for figuring worthiness thusly:

"Steve Phillips came up with this and it's really a great one," says LaGreca, "You take the five starters for the Yankees and the five starters for the Sox and you rank them one to ten. Where does Clemens fit in there?"

There's a pause as you just know Kay is trying to do what I was trying to do in my car -- figure out what the frick this has to do with a pitcher's value. And then he comes back with this:

*sigh* "Oh... leave it to Phillips to come up with something like this."

Exactly. It makes no sense and this was about as close to saying it on the air as these guys were going to.